Debates of Oct. 21st, 2024

Innovation, Science and Industry

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

Pursuant to order made on Monday, June 10, it is my duty to table, in both official languages, a letter that I have received from the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel regarding the order for the production of documents from the government, Sustainable Development Technology Canada and the Auditor General of Canada.

The House resumed from October 11 consideration of the motion, of the amendment and of the amendment to the amendment.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, I talked about the culture of secrecy and the corruption in the form of conflicts of interest that was obvious right from the very beginning of the Liberal government. In the time I have left, I will talk about the situation we are in right now.

Parliament is paralyzed because the government has refused an order for the production of documents, which was passed by the House some time ago. That is why we are here. The Conservatives are not interested in simply letting debate on this motion collapse so the House can fob this off to a parliamentary committee, where the government and its NDP partners can buy more time, maybe delay a final report or maybe avoid a further vote finding the government once again in contempt of Parliament. The Conservatives want the government to comply with the order. The Conservatives want the government to produce the documents that the House voted for.

The Liberals are stuck in the old debate, which the House has already settled. That debate was whether the House should order that documents be turned over to the RCMP, but that ship has sailed. That question is academic. The House has already voted on that question. The House voted to produce documents, so the government's refusal to do so now is a contempt of Parliament. You, Mr. Speaker, have ruled that this refusal is prima facie evidence of contempt of Parliament, which is why this question is being debated to the exclusion of all business of the House.

I would like to address the two main points the government House Leader and her parliamentary secretary keep making over and over again during debate in the House, to the media outside the House and during question period.

First, government members have repeatedly claimed that the government's contempt for Parliament is somehow justified because the order for the production of documents threatens the charter rights of accused persons and prosecutorial independence, while of course ignoring that it is violating section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is the guarantor of democracy. This argument is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard in the House of Commons, and in nine years in the House, I have heard some pretty dumb things come from the government. Before addressing that argument, it has to be pointed out that Vice-Admiral Mark Norman and Jody Wilson-Raybould might have something to say about the government's track record on prosecutorial independence, but I do not have time to go into the old scandals. I will deal with the argument that government members have made.

Ordering the production of documents that belong to the Crown in order to give them to another agency of the Crown, the RCMP, has nothing to do with directing prosecutions. Saying so is just plain dumb. Does the order the House has voted for say that the House instructs the RCMP to arrest a particular Liberal insider who took the public's money and gave it to themselves? No, the order does not say that. Does the order direct Crown prosecution services to prosecute somebody in particular, one of the Liberal insiders who, again, took the public's money and voted to give it to themselves? No, it does not direct anybody to do any such thing.

There is nothing in this production order that compels anyone to do anything besides release the documents and provide them to members of the RCMP so they can have evidence that may be potentially relevant to a case that they acknowledge they are already investigating. That is all this order does. It does not say anything about directing law enforcement or Crown prosecutors to do anything, so this bizarre charter argument is complete and total nonsense.

The vigour and enthusiasm with which the government House Leader and her parliamentary secretary advance this argument can only be explained by blind faith in insipid talking points or by functional civic illiteracy. The House of Commons is the embodiment of Canadian democracy, Canada's grand inquisitive body that, on behalf of the people of Canada, who elect members, holds the executive branch, the most powerful people in Canada, to account. It is the will of elected members of Parliament, the will of Canadians, that must be respected.

The second main argument that I have heard from the government, and I am now starting to hear it creep into the other opposition parties propping up the government, is that continuing debate on this motion when all parties have said they will support it is paralyzing the House and preventing it from moving on to other business. However, this argument is a bit too clever. It is victim blaming and it is gaslighting. The Liberals are trying to say of elected members of Parliament that it is their fault for debating the government's corruption, and not the government's fault for refusing an order of the House. When they say this, they are missing the point altogether. Instead of studying contempt of Parliament at a parliamentary committee, the government could end its contempt of Parliament by releasing the documents. It could solve the problem rather than study the problem, and that is why we will continue to debate this motion until the documents are released.

As for the other business of the House, I have no interest in moving on from dealing with this corruption just so the government can introduce more bills and laws that are going to harm Canadians. I am not interested in allowing the government to get over the debate so it can introduce the long-anticipated ways and means motions on a capital gains tax increase that will punish thousands of small business owners in my riding, with few companies receiving the exemption being carved out for other Canadians. I am not interested in that.

I do not want to give the Liberals a chance to increase taxes on Canadians, to further sap the productivity of Canada and to further decrease per capita GDP, as we have observed under the Liberals. I am not interested in the rest of their agenda either. For example, a bill they may want to debate, Bill C-63, would create a new, big bureaucracy without doing anything to address online harms, and would give them a new group of insiders they could appoint to that board.

The only reservation I have about the time that has gone into this debate is that there is another urgent matter. We need to address the other contempt problem we have with the government, wherein the minister from Edmonton was engaging in private business while a minister of the Crown. The evidence could not be more clear on that. His business associate, who was involved in, among other things, shady pandemic profiteering, claimed that there was some other guy named “Randy”, who we are supposed to believe is not the Minister of Employment. We need to get to the bottom of that as well.

There is another solution available: The government, if it thinks that Parliament is paralyzed, that we have other business we need to get to and that Parliament has become dysfunctional, has a remedy. The Liberals could call an election immediately. That is the solution. When Parliament is paralyzed, if they think Parliament is not functioning, they can call an election. That is the beauty of the parliamentary system. The government always has recourse directly to the voters of Canada.

If the Liberals really think the opposition is irresponsible, that other things are more important, that critical parliamentary business is being stymied and that Canadians are on their side with the refusal to comply with an order of elected members of Parliament, they can call an election and let the people of Canada decide.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on the member's reference to the word “dumb”. I will tell him about one of the dumbest things I have heard coming from the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. This is the leader who refuses to get a security clearance so he can be made aware of foreign interference. We know about the many allegations in regard to his leadership, not to mention what we hear about Conservative parliamentarians, yet the leader of the Conservatives is saying, “So what if I am leader? I do not need a security clearance; I prefer to be dumb.” That is what he is saying about this issue.

Why is the member's leader scared to get a security clearance? Is it because he has something to hide?

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

Colleagues, I will move on to the answer from the hon. member for Calgary Rocky Ridge, but I encourage all members not to call into question the courage of members. It is an important aspect of maintaining parliamentary politeness in this place.

The hon. member for Calgary Rocky Ridge has the floor.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for that correction and also for correcting that member's unparliamentary behaviour. It was a nice deflection by the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader, which was entirely unrelated to the present debate. He may want to ask himself about the Prime Minister, whom he supports, using a judicial inquiry to make a partisan broadside against the Leader of the Opposition, which is disgraceful.

If the Liberals have nothing to hide, why will they not release the names on that issue and why will they not release the documents on this issue?

[Mario Beaulieu, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Mr. Speaker, our Conservative colleagues talk a lot about corruption. One way to combat corruption in politics is to have a system where political parties receive a per-vote subsidy. The Conservatives are the ones who did away with that system.

I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on that.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to stick to questions that are related to the speech I made. That question is not relevant to my debate.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the first part of my colleague's speech the week before last and then his finishing up today. He did a great job summing up the corruption we have seen from across the way. I would like to give the member a little more time to talk about what his constituents are saying when he is out door knocking and about what he has seen in his nine years of being a member of Parliament in the House.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the most common thing I hear when I am door knocking in Calgary is, “When is the election coming, and how soon can it be here so we can get rid of this government so it can stop bringing in policies that harm Canadians, especially western Canadians?”

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member said my question was not necessarily relevant because he did not like it. He feels a little uncomfortable. However, when we are talking about accountability, he is talking about paper production. We are talking about information that the leader of the Conservative Party does not want to hear.

The leader of the Conservative Party wants to be prime minister of a G8 country, yet he does not want to get the security clearance. Canadians have a right to know why he is so scared of getting the security clearance. Does he have something to hide?

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the member could perhaps check with the Table and get the orders of the day to understand what we are debating here today, or he could have listened to my speech, and then he could debate the actual motion before the House. It is a tactic, a deflection, and he is very good at that, but I will take the bait and say that the issue he is so fixated on could be solved easily: release the names.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciated your intervention earlier. I felt like we were off to a rough start for a Monday morning. With all due respect, I think that it is soon going to take more than a warning when members get out of hand like that and start saying that others are dumb. This is not the place for that. I needed to say that.

Here is my question for the member about his speech. I find it rather odd that the member told my colleague from La Pointe-de-l'Île that his question was not relevant. We are talking about corruption and about influence on governments. My colleague brought up public funding of political parties. Public funding of political parties is another example of how Quebec is a good 10 to 15 years ahead of everyone else. The Government of Quebec reformed party financing in 2012. Now, contributions are limited. Rationally speaking, who really thinks that ordinary citizens are giving $1,700 to a political party, even if they do get a tax refund? The system needs to be reformed. A per-vote subsidy is a reasonable way to ensure respect for democracy and to limit outside influence.

I would like my colleague to answer the question.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

Before moving on to the member's answer, I want to respond to the member for Berthier—Maskinongé.

I appreciate his comments about using parliamentary language. While that word is not forbidden, it is borderline. I heard it from both sides of the House, which is why I wanted to call everyone to order.

The hon. member for Calgary Rocky Ridge.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am quite certain that my remarks on the record were in order. I do not know if you heard something from other parts of the chamber that was not on the record. You would be the first to tell me if there was anything out of line in that speech. I gave a pretty clear description and debate about the motion at hand in the House of Commons.

It is disappointing that so many other members want to talk about anything other than what we are debating, which is the government's refusal to comply with an order of the House of Commons. If government members want to talk about election financing models, they could use an opposition day in the future for that, if they wish, or we could have some other debate about that, but I am not going to be distracted from this motion by engaging in that issue.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask my hon. colleague about the seriousness of how, in fact, the Auditor General found over 180 incidents of conflict of interest with the board members at SDTC. The total was $400 million for approximately half of the actual contracts given out by the organization, so it could potentially be even more.

I wonder if the member could speak to the actual seriousness of what we are discussing here today.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Kelowna—Lake Country for what is actually a really intelligent question about the matter at hand. We have had comments about all kinds of other things but that was right to the point.

The House voted for the production of documents because of an Auditor General report, as well as whistle-blower testimony about severe corruption at SDTC, where Liberal insiders voted to give themselves and their companies, which they control and own, the public's money improperly. This is well documented. It is under investigation by the RCMP. That is why this is so serious and that is the reason for the extraordinary step of a production order that was made by the House.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am disappointed by the member's lack of recognition, so I will ask him for his personal opinion. Does he believe the leader of the Conservative Party should be getting a security clearance, given the fact that every other leader in the House of Commons will? If he does not believe that, will he tell Canadians why the leader of the Conservative Party is scared to get that security clearance?

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am on the record from my time at the defence committee about the need for parliamentarians to have clearances, so that is not the question nor the point here. I do not agree with the member, as the opposition leader has been very clear on this all the way along.

However, every time the member rises in this debate, he is engaging in filibuster. He is filling time to extend the government's words and not advance debate.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to add my voice to the conversation we are having around the government's breach of privilege and scandal, which is just the latest in a long line of scandals under the Liberal government.

I have a number of points to make in this debate, but I will first say it is unfortunate that we are having to have this debate. It is an important one because the government needs to be held accountable, but it is unfortunate that it is necessary when there are many things the House could and should be dealing with. We have a government that refuses to be accountable, and without accountability, accountability first to this House but, more importantly, as an extension, to Canadians, we do not have a democracy.

Right now, the government refuses to be held accountable. There are a number of examples, and I will raise a few of them in the course of my speech today. This is just the latest in a long line of them and it is incredibly unfortunate that we are having to be here today to try to hold a government accountable on something so basic, without the need for a debate like this one to highlight such a situation.

What we are talking about today relates to what has become known as the green slush fund. The Auditor General of Canada has found that the Liberal government turned what was known as Sustainable Development Technology Canada into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. The board that was set up to hand out these grants gave itself almost 400 million dollars' worth of contracts inappropriately. That was $400 million of Canadian taxpayers' money.

I will pause for just a second. That is a lot of money, $400 million from Canadians who have worked hard. They have packed their lunch, put on their work boots, gone to work and worked hard. Some people back home in my province of Alberta work really long hours. It is back-breaking work, in some cases. These people go to work, in many cases, away from their families because they have to travel up north or to other places to work. They do that because they need to feed and put a roof over the heads of their families. They need to ensure their children have opportunities to be involved in sports or to succeed as they grow, mature and become adults themselves. This $400 million has not gone to feed Canadians' families, to put a roof over their heads, to make sure their kids go to summer camp, play a sport, take dance lessons or art lessons or any of that. The $400 million has gone, in this one case, to make Liberal insiders rich.

I do not think anyone who gets out of bed early in the morning and leaves their family to go to work would say they would not mind a bit of that, or in fact, a whole lot of it in this case, going to Liberal insiders because the Liberal Party wants to buy favour with people and hopefully keep itself in power. I do not think anybody in this country would say they get out of bed in the morning to send their tax dollars to Ottawa so this kind of thing can go on.

That is the kind of accountability we are talking about right now. We are talking about holding a government accountable for the $400 million of hard-earned Canadian taxpayer dollars that are sent to Ottawa so that those guys over there, the Liberal government, can send them out to their friends and make them rich. That is what we are talking about today, and that is pretty sad. We would never even be needing to have a conversation like this if that government had just a bit of basic accountability, but this is not something people have come to expect from the Liberal government. It is why it is time for the government to go. It is why it is time for it to be replaced.

[An hon. member]

Time's up.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Exactly, the time is up for those guys, and Canadians know it.

Mr. Speaker, the only thing that is standing in the way of that is an election. As soon as that happens, the Liberal government will be gone, because the Liberals have failed to show any basic accountability.

This is almost $400 million of hard-earned Canadian taxpayer dollars. The Auditor General had a look at all of this and found that $58 million went to 10 different projects that were completely ineligible. There was no ability on any of those occasions to demonstrate any environmental benefit or any development of green technology, and it was supposed about that.

Let us think about that for a second: 10 different projects received $58 million but did not meet the criteria for which the money was intended. They did not provide any environmental benefit. They did not develop any green technology. One would say that it almost looks like that money was stolen. There was no benefit based on the criteria of the program; for all intents and purposes, $58 million of Canadian taxpayer money stolen.

Then there were 186 projects, worth about $334 million, where at least one of the board members had a conflict of interest.

[An hon. member]

What, 186? Shocking.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

There were 186 projects where there was a conflict of interest by one of the board members.

Mr. Speaker, another $58 million went to projects where the board did not ensure the contribution agreement terms were met. Let me put it this way. This is either the most egregious case of incompetence we have ever seen or it is the complete theft of taxpayer money. It might be both, in fact. However, it is staggering to imagine the magnitude of this and the number of instances where there are conflicts of interest or outright complete ignorance of the rules. It is staggering. The amount of money is also staggering.

The Auditor General has made it very clear that the blame lies with the Liberal government, particularly with the industry minister, because they did not monitor this. Either they did not monitor it, or maybe they were okay with what was happening. I do not know. I suppose that is part of what we need to determine.

At the end of the day, this money, this nearly $400 million of Canadian taxpayer money, was given to Liberal insiders. In order to try to get to the bottom of all of this, there is a need for the information being requested to be provided to the RCMP. For some reason, and I think we can all imagine what that reason might be, the Liberal government does not want to provide that information.

I can imagine the Liberal government does not like being held accountable, and we have many examples of that. I will get into a few of those examples, because this is a pattern, and I want to show and establish that pattern. This is a government that tends to do these kinds of things. It interferes or allows things like this to occur, and its friends get rich. This is a pattern. Then when there is any effort at trying to hold it accountable for what has gone on, it does everything it can to prevent being held accountable.

Let me speak to a couple of examples where we can see this pattern, and this is the latest example in that pattern. The most well-known of those examples was the SNC-Lavalin affair. Everyone in Canada is aware of that one. They are all aware of what happened with Jody Wilson-Raybould, when the Prime Minister tried to pressure her to be inappropriately involved in her role as the attorney general.

She stood on her principle and refused to do that, despite immense pressure from the Prime Minister . What did he do? He fired her because she refused to interfere inappropriately in an investigation. She knew it was wrong and the Prime Minister did not care. He wanted her to do it anyway. Essentially that is what happened. She refused, despite all the pressure she received from the Prime Minister of our country. For that, she lost her job.

To give a little more context, a Liberal-connected firm faced charges of fraud and corruption related to payments made to Libyan officials. In this situation, again, the Prime Minister interfered to help out his friends. It was found, in this case, that he violated the Conflict of Interest Act, which is not the only time this happened. Where this becomes really germane, is that we discovered later on, I believe it was last year, that the reason the RCMP was unable to pursue a criminal investigation was because the Prime Minister refused to provide the information that was necessary.

We see this pattern of a government that refuses, when it is caught red-handed, to provide the accountability, the documents, in this case, that are needed to properly investigate it.

I can give another example of that type of scenario, and there are many of them. In fact, almost every week there seems to be a new one. There is the scandal around the Winnipeg national microbiology lab. The situation was so bad that the government was ordered to provide documents and a former Speaker was sued by his own government because it was trying to find a way to not provide that information.

It sounds so ridiculous that it is almost hard to believe it is true, but that is the kind of thing we are seeing. That is one of those examples. The government wanted so badly to hide this information that it sued the Speaker of the House of Commons, one of its own members of Parliament. It is astounding.

I want to focus a little more on one, with respect to these examples, because it is one of the files I am tasked with shadowing the government on, and that is Veterans Affairs. There are many examples like this one, but it is one I am very intimately familiar with because of how much effort I and other Conservative members of the Veterans Affairs committee have put into trying to see addressed. It is the controversy and scandal around the national monument to the mission in Afghanistan.

Let me give a bit of context on this. This was obviously a monument to a mission that ended more than a decade ago. The previous Conservative government announced that it would be built. In the nine years since the Liberal government has been in power, it has somehow found a way to ensure that this has not been built.

In my opinion, and, I think, in the opinion of many Canadians, it is an incredible slap in the face to those who served in that mission, those who gave their lives serving our country in that mission and the families of those fallen. It is another extreme example of the government: first, showing complete incompetence; and, second, trying to avoid accountability. Essentially, what happened was it set up a jury to determine what the monument design should be. This was after taking years to get to that point. I do not know how something so important could not be a priority for a government, for any government, frankly, but it was not, for whatever reason, and the government will have to answer to veterans for that.

The government did set up this jury process. This is an internationally recognized process. The jury selected the monument that it believed best fit the criteria. In about a year-and-a-half period after that, we had enough information that the Prime Minister and his office interfered in the process to try to change the result. Eventually, it culminated in an announcement of a different design than what was agreed to by the jury. This is the first time that anyone can recall in the history of these types of processes across the world, that the selection has been disregarded by a government.

No real explanation was given. To this day, we still do not know why the Prime Minister interfered in this. The reason why this is so relevant is because it is another example where, over the course of months, the veterans affairs committee has been trying to get the release of documentation that would indicate what exactly occurred in that year and a half when the Prime Minister was interfering. Why did he interfere? The fact that the government will not tell us that there was a good reason probably indicates that it is not something good and that it is trying its best to cover that up. That is the only thing we can conclude from all of that.

It is another example of a government that is doing everything it possibly can to avoid releasing some documents that would allow it to be held accountable for its actions; in this case, actions that dishonour the memory of Canadians who gave their lives in service to our country. It is bad enough that $400 million of hard-earned taxpayer money was given away to Liberal insiders, but it is far worse that the Liberal government has dishonoured the memory of Canadians who gave their lives in service to our country. Imagine how their families must feel, knowing that it has done that. That is just insult to injury. To then try to be not held accountable for that kind of action is really disgraceful.

This is a pattern, and I could go on and on because there are so many other examples of a government that just does not want to be held accountable. When we have a government that refuses to be accountable, we know the situation. We know that this is a government that has reached a point where it is almost corruption, and I think that all Canadians would agree. It is not “almost”; it is corruption, frankly. Canadians want to see it held accountable and they want to see an election so they can do just that.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, the only prime minister in Canada's history, let alone that of the British Commonwealth, to be held in contempt of Parliament was Stephen Harper. The greatest advocate for Stephen Harper at that time was none other than the leader of the Conservative Party. Is there any surprise there?

The leader of the Conservative Party now says that he does not need to have security clearance and that, at the end of the day, he would prefer to be naive about foreign interference as opposed to understanding the issue. What is in the past history of the current leader of the Conservative Party that disallows him from being able to get his security clearance?

Can the member opposite share with Canadians what Pierre Poilievre, or the Conservative leader, is hiding that prevents him from getting security clearance?